A Groves man has offended his neighbors and maybe the sensibilities of most civil people around here. But that’s not the real news.

Apparently the Taft Street property owner has startled and offended many passersby to his home over many years, posting hand-crafted signs bearing messages that range from unabashedly hateful to simply incomprehensible.

Even sundown doesn’t spare passersby on Taft Street; the signs are illuminated by floodlights at night.

What has changed of late, apparently, is a new wave of offended people. It’s encouraging that some people can still recognize such messages as bizarre and hateful when they read them — not everyone is so enlightened.

This week, for example, some of the signs on Taft Street could be discerned as racist and anti-Catholic. Another sign bore bizarre references to Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis that only the homeowner might understand.

Other signs have expressed the homeowner’s wrath for lawyers and the Vatican. In some sense, it ought to bolster the esteem of those who live their lives under the floodlights of such hate; sometimes it’s a good thing to be defined by the character of your critics.

Some of those offended have expressed their dismay to Groves officials — that happens about once a year, Groves City Manager D. Sosa says — but neither the presence of the signs nor their wrong-headed messages are against the law. Nor should they be.

“We have consulted with the FBI and our own police department,” Sosa told the Port Arthur News. “He is not in any violation of any local ordinances; we’re not talking about action (on the homeowner’s part), we’re talking about speech.”

Not just speech, but free speech, a benchmark of our free society. So while the homeowner’s messages may offend others, those others possess the perfect right to turn away or express their disapproval.

This, too, is important to remember when it comes to free speech: It’s generally advanced along the margins, when unpopular ideas are given the light of day. If we all agreed on everything, what would free speech mean?

More troubling would be if people embraced hateful messages like those espoused at the Taft Street address silently, if they bore such ill will only in their hearts and minds with no opportunity to hear other, opposing views.

It would be worse, still, if they tried to silence the unpopular messenger rather than confront him with the reality of better ideas. Some folks would prefer to silence their opponents rather than contradict them. That undercuts the notion of being free, empowered people.

Minority citizens will weather one Taft Street man’s mean-spirited messages just fine; so will Catholics and lawyers or any combination of the three. Lincoln and Davis are beyond his reach.